20 Greatest Multiplayer Games Ever

The main issue with this one is that, while it's a great concept, if it's not one that you were with from the beginning, then you're going to either have to do a lot of homework, or have a perpetually bemused look on your face. These are more comparable to the Exoskeletons of Call of Duty: GO was conceived as nothing more ambitious than a console port; an experiment to see if PlayStation and Xbox gamers would engage with the Counter-Strike name. Hawken As it's been in beta since with little to no marketing push, you may have forgotten about Hawken or were unfamiliar with it in the first place. It was there that Fable Fortune found private funding despite a failed Kickstarter campaign. Taking a break from talking about destroying your enemies, NoBrakes. All of the tiles circled will then change to your color.

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It's an odd blend, what with having a proper inventory with potions and armor and rings and different weapons, not to mention on-the-fly quests popping up all over the place, getting you to kill this goblin wizard, slaughter that dwarven king, but the game has more in common with classic arcade titles than something like Oblivion.

It could be seen as a Diablo-alike, but that's a likeness born more out of atmosphere and tone than how you play it. You can have almost a hundred people in a zone at one time, all off in their own part of the woods, killing their own bad dudes. Sometimes you stumble upon a few, sometimes you're left alone for hours at a time, but you're constantly stumbling upon the detritus of their passing, in abandoned loot, or just the eerie silence where there once was guys who wanted to kill you.

If battling trainers is the part of Pokemon games you enjoy, Pokemon Showdown is for you. You can jump straight into matches against other players without having to level up or care for your pokemon beforehand. You can then quickly go through a match, selecting moves and countering the other trainer. This fast-paced game takes all of the work out of raising pokemon, leaving just gratuitous pokemon takedowns. An isometric shooter in which you can battle with your friends against an opposing team, or fight in a free-for-all with everyone.

Power-up stations placed in the arena grant different weapons. There are a couple characters to choose from off the bat, and plenty more to unlock as you bump off your enemies. The main goal of the game is simply to stay alive and earn enough points to reach the top of the scoreboard. The more points you earn the more you level up and the more weapons you can unlock.

It's very quick to get into, perfect if you are looking for fast-paced matches. It has the same main goal, though: Since you are a high-tech mech, you can easily carry around a few different weapons as you explore what seems to be an abandoned laboratory.

There are a few different power-ups in Mechar. Though the map seems quite small, it is a very well laid-out space where you can quickly find and destroy your enemies. Key platforms into the game are tied to a key. Green key toggles green bricks, red key toggles red bricks, etc. And by 'toggle', I mean toggles their existence.

There are some masochists out there. This pixelated strategy game has you building your own kingdom while trying to fight and take down others. You can construct buildings, manage units, and collect resources, all in the name of survival. At first, you need to focus on gathering resources and building up your base. Your ultimate goal is to have the best army and destroy anything in your path—you can do this on your own or with a friend even an AI to grow your base together. There are quite a few different upgrades and weapons to help you fight back against attacks.

You can even research different spells to make some of your units specifically mages stronger, or sway some dragons on your side. If you're good enough, you can even start to fight in ranked battles of Little War Game, taking on some seriously challenging competition. What do brutes do?

They punch people in the face over and over again. You can charge up your punch or rapidly flail your fists of fury to try to knock them down, and once an enemy is down you can continue to punch their bodies until their health runs out and they die in a burst of colorful orbs. These orbs can be picked up and count as XP, helping you grow larger and become more muscled as you increase your level. Neptune's Pride is the epitome of backstabbing, two-faced, genuine human nastiness.

Or, I suppose, you could play it like an honourable, decent human being. But where's the fun in that? Taking a break from talking about destroying your enemies, NoBrakes. If you make it across the checkpoint, you get a power-up that can boost your speed or fire a bullet that will give an enemy a little shove. Sometimes, though, moving forwards is not the right way to go.

Depending on where the next checkpoint spawns, you may need to turn around and continue in the opposite direction. No matter where you're headed, make sure you avoid the wall or else you will suffer instant death and have to respawn in a new match.

A version of Snake Like the traditional game of Snake, you control a lone, elongated body that can move around the field on a grid. This all sounds very basic, much like any other snake-remake.

However, your snake can move faster by moving alongside enemies, causing an electrical pulse to appear between you both. With this additional speed you can move faster and avoid death. The floor is made of hexes, each one white to begin with. You convert as many tiles as possible to your color, selecting tiles by moving over them, before linking back to tiles that are already the correct color.

All of the tiles circled will then change to your color. While you are exploring blank tiles or tiles that are not your color, a tail appears where you have traveled. Other players can collide with this tail to kill you, causing your tiles disappear and forcing you to restart. This forces you to be careful when you leave the relative safety of your colored area, picking and choosing when to take the leap out to gain more ground. There are green circles that float around the area—if eaten, they will help you to go much faster.

You can expand the area your color occupies and help eliminate other colors, but if your tail gets hit once, it's all whisked away. Use it to bring ruination to other slimes, though shooting will kill them slowly and is the least effective way to destroy enemies. You can also hide in the bushes, disappearing from the map completely, and observe the carnage covertly. When you destroy a slime, they leave behind colorful splats of their body to decorate the floor, as well as some DNA that can be collected to level yourself up.

Foes is a sleek arena shooter that pits you against enemies as the arena gradually gets smaller and smaller. Everyone starts off exactly the same, without any weapons, and you have to scavenge to find them. Once the timer is exhausted and the round begins, you will notice that the edges of the area are filled with some kind of poison, forcing everyone closer to the center.

This prevents you and your enemies from hiding out on the edges of the maps, or avoiding each other for too long. The aim of Lordz is to become the dominant kingdom in the land. Only certain characters require your prized coin. Interested in knowing what Wolfenstein was before The New Order?

Wolfenstein 3D is now free, and will take you back to the year when celebrity game developers John Carmack and John Romero teamed up to make a shareware game like nothing before it.

Wolfenstein 3D took concepts from Muse Software's Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein to create a three-dimensional first-person shooter that would later inspire the development of Doom.

Keep in mind while playing, though, that while Wolfenstein 3D was impressive for its time, it's probably not what you would expect from a first-person shooter of today's standards. Nonetheless, it's an easy and free way to experience game history in an old-school World War II game rich with narrative about, well, shooting Nazis in the face.

Don't expect to be blown away by the story in the same way as the Wolfenstein franchise's more recent entries. It may be an old vet in gaming terms, but nothing offers so much crazy fun as Team Fortress 2. Unlike most shooters of its age, players are still there to have a good time rather than hurl abuse at newcomers, and there's no shortage of cool toys to have fun with. Endlessly silly and amazingly fresh, it's still one of the shooter genre's kings, free-to-play or not.

As you might guess, there are some micro-transactions involved. You can buy additional items, often used to customise your character. You can create your own. It's fun, and gets you even more involved in TF2. Those cheeky devils at Valve know what they're doing.

Though it may have gotten lost in the fog of Overwatch, Lawbreakers and the like, Gigantic is yet another hero shooter in a jumbled sea of hero shooter fanaticism. The gameplay largely revolves around two teams of five players who are both trying to defeat both each other and a mystical leviathan known as a guardian. Likewise, Gigantic gives players the choice between a wide variety of characters each with their own abilities and upgrades.

The Gathering is fun, right? But what if you could play it from the comfort of your PC? Fortunately, that's possible thanks to Magic Duels. Whether you're a first-time player or a year vet, Duels lets you do everything the card game does and more. While over new cards are advertised as being attainable throughout the game, there's also a unique story mode where you can experience Magic like never before.

If narrative in your card games isn't your cup of tea, there's also a Battle Mode in which you can challenge your friends, a four-player Two-Headed Giant battle and even an offline solo mode you can use for practice against AI.

Choose whether you want to be a member of the Hero or Villain faction then customize your character and you'll be sent out into the world of DC Universe Online at the hands of Daybreak Game Company. After some training, the game assigns you a position as either a member of the Justice League or The Society depending on your choice of hero or villain. Favorably, it's not difficult to play without using real-world currency too.

Abilities are upgraded based on a collectible card system, which can completely change the way each character plays. While cosmetic items are available to buy using real-world currency, everything else can be unlocked simply by playing the game.

These can be used to purchase more cards, costumes and weapon skins to make your characters more unique and skillful on the battlefield. You may be familiar with Fifa already, but Pro Evolution Soccer — or PES — is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all-time.

There are in-app purchases along the way, but you can always upgrade to the full version later should this one not satisfy. You can now get Spelunky on all sorts of platforms — it's pretty high-profile for an indie title. But it began its life PC-exclusive, and its original 'non HD' Classic version you can still get for free today. The catch is that every time you play, the entire game is randomized. In one game you'll stumble through screen after screen of spiked horrors and swarming monsters; in the next, the software will bend over backwards to give you gold and help you on your way.

You learn how each randomized world ticks and which equipment will give you a fighting chance. And then you'll die some more. Like everything else in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, the game takes place in Forgotten Realms, specifically, as the name suggests, in Neverwinter. However, the rules are slightly modified, letting players heal their allies in addition to allowing for the use of special abilities in combat after racking up enough action points.

Melee modding community, who says he developed Doki Doki Literature Club because of his indifference towards anime. As engrossing as the trio of female supporting characters appear to be in Doki Doki Literature Club, we would advise getting too attached to them. Without spoiling the story, the first thing you see when you boot up Doki Doki Literature Club is a content warning, suggesting that those with severe anxiety refrain from playing at all.

For nearly 15 years now, Puzzle Pirates has been a household name for kids with unrestricted access to the computer labs at school. The goal is to join a crew and ideally become a captain, by completing puzzles alongside other players. Dark Seas, on the other hand, is the Steam-exclusive version of Puzzle Pirates that introduces an entirely new ocean known as Obsidian.

It also comes from a different developer, a nonprofit called Grey Havens founded by several former members of Three Rings Design. Before the advent of Dark Seas, you could only get the multiplayer portion of Puzzle Pirates on Steam. Its development cycle was a disaster, but in the end, the Phantom Dust remaster turned out just fine. A new IP in the form of a Japanese budget card game for the original Xbox, it seemed to good to be true when Microsoft revealed back at E3 that a complete remake was in the works… and, as it turns out, it was.

The remake was canned in , but Microsoft still wanted to revive the cult classic one-off. As it turns out, the company did so with a remaster, not a remake. Inspiring the creation of Minecraft was no small feat for 2D sandbox game Dwarf Fortress. Dubbed a construction and management simulator, Dwarf Fortress takes simple text-based graphics into a more modern, piece of software. The game is often classified as a cult classic because of its open-ended nature and serving as one of the most iconic examples of a procedurally generated roguelike.

This means Dwarf Fortress both randomizes its environments and makes the game's permadeath system a much more difficult problem to avoid. This led to the unofficial slogan for the game "Losing is fun," which was either ironic or an accurate description of what happens in the game. Tough to say either way. One thing's for sure, though. If you want to experience an important part of games history, Dwarf Fortress is a solid start, as it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City back in Can't say that for a lot of free-to-play games.

After a troubled development cycle, Fable Fortune is the collectible card game that you probably thought would never release. The team behind the Fable franchise — the illustrious group of individuals at Lionhead Studios — has since departed its doors, which were coincidentally permanently shut two years ago.

It was there that Fable Fortune found private funding despite a failed Kickstarter campaign. Skeptics will be quick to compare Fable Fortune to Hearthstone. If you're more interested in the property management systems of Fallout 4 rather than the overwhelming majority of the role-playing game's content, Fallout Shelter is a great place to start. Up until recently, the simulation game was limited to mobile platforms Android and iOS.

However, with the introduction of Quests in version 1. All in all, Fallout Shelter doesn't feel much different on PC, and that's undoubtedly a good thing. Mouse controls work well in place of a touchscreen, graphics are optimized even for low-end hardware and with windowed mode enabled by default, it's easy to find yourself caring after your vault residents during your downtime at work. With an indisputably manageable price point free , Fallout Shelter could very well become the next Solitaire in your office or at school.

As a result of being overshadowed when it originally released six years ago, Brink is now completely free to play on Steam — no microtransactions added. Bittersweet considering its lukewarm commercial reception, but we should celebrate the fact that this unique spin on the traditional multiplayer first-person shooter is now available for all to enjoy.

The result is a fun, if flawed, experience that blends single-player objectives harmoniously with heated multiplayer gunplay. Battleborn was originally released in May , the same month as Overwatch. The main difference is that Battleborn draws influence from MOBA games while Overwatch is a more traditional PvP shooter with an eccentric cast of characters.

Battleborn also has a single-player campaign, which can be unlocked using real-world currency. From independent developer and publisher Freejam, Robocraft lets you commandeer jet cars not jets and cars, but jet cars , tanks, flying warships, helicopters and drones. Likewise, Robocraft lets you create or join clans with up to 50 members.

Currently in open beta on the PC, it's also available to play on iOS and Android, so you can pick up where you left off when you're away from your battlestation. Set at the turn of the 10th Century, Total War Battles: Kingdom combines army management with kingdom building to deliver a bite-sized RTS game you can pick up and play anywhere, anytime.

Linux, Windows or Mac - which one is best for you? Watch our guide video below: Why Dota 2 Reborn is finally a game for everyone A brief tutorial now points out the ropes, with the Steam Community stepping in to provide guides to the original MOBA.

Play Dota 2 for free. As we point out in our Rocket League PC review , mastering all the tricks of successfully passing, shooting, and scoring is a thrilling learning curve.

Headshots in shooters are ten-a-penny, but a goal in Rocket League is something special. Akin to Towerfall, everyone in the room will be ooh-ing and aahh-ing as the ball zooms from one end of the pitch to the other, punctuated by an obligatory elbow to the ribs to prevent an inevitable goal.

Make sure you read our Rocket League tips to ensure you outscore your friends with ease. Slaying demons, playing dress-up, and obsessing over loot are all much more interesting activities with friends.

Diablo 3 packs in hundreds of hours of grinding and gear-stat fetishism, which helps it remain one of the best multiplayer games around, despite its age. The setup is wonderfully simple: Adding a second player ups the challenge, but also broadens your horizons in terms of specialist abilities.

The best multiplayer games are all about having fun with friends — and exploding the noggins of internet randoms, of course. The true chaos of this couch co-op cooking game is not revealed immediately. Shrouded beneath a cute, colourful aesthetic, you will likely fly — or should we say fry?

Each meal you cook helps save the world from a massive meatball. If you fail to assign clear roles and communicate effectively, beef patties will burn, dirty dishes will pile up, and customers will get cheesed off. From swaying pirate ships to lorries that split in half in the middle of the motorway, the kitchens in which you work your gastronomic magic will become increasingly treacherous as the dishes you cook grow in complexity.

TowerFall Ascension is a game all about platforms — apart from the ill-fated Ouya platform on which it originally launched, that is. One of the best multiplayer games for couch co-op, the simplicity of both premise and control scheme — jump, move, shoot — ensures accessibility.

You might as well play it long after your friends have gone, too: Dark World DLC is also well worth playing. It is easy to be cynical about Worms, now entering its third decade with a penchant for platform proliferation. Chop a turn-based party game from Team17 in half, myth has it, and two new groups of the slippery blighters will spring writhing from its remains.

But the apple core ensures it remains one of the best multiplayer games on PC: Typically played with three or four players, Worms is a slapstick spectator sport ripe for grenade gaffes, jumping misjudgements, and an assortment of other seconds-left mistakes. It may be disarmingly cute, but Worms is still one of the best strategy games on PC. Some say that Worms Armageddon was a spiritual high point.

But we recommend the subsequent Worms World Party for the potential for customisation, or the recent Worms W. D to see the current vehicle-infused iteration of the formula. So there you have it, the best multiplayer games on PC. Many of the best upcoming PC games also have exciting new multiplayer modes.

Solo gaming is fine and all, but beating other gamers makes the best multiplayer modes incredibly moreish.